We’re still 10 days out from their season finale, and Seattle’s sold more than 64,000 tickets to their Oct. 27 match with the LA Galaxy. Not only is there a chance the game will break the Sounders’ attendance record, but they may not need Portland’s fans to do it.

That last bit’s important because the two largest crowds in Seattle’s history have been for Timbers games, the extra fans Portland brings north giving CenturyLink’s attendance a significant boost. The largest crowd for a non-Timbers home game was 64,140 against San Jose in 2011. For a Timbers game? Seattle drew 67,385 last August. With 10 days to get the word out, perhaps next week’s crowd can overtake that Portland number.

Seattle and Los Angeles have developed a minor rivalry, but next Sunday’s battle will be about the playoff implications. After last night’s win over Montréal, Los Angeles sits third in the West, with the Sounders’ three-game losing streak seeing the former Supporters’ Shield contenders slide to fourth.1 If the standings stay the same, next week’s match will decide which teamgoes into the four-five playoff, though both sides have a game to manage in the interim (Seattle visits Dallas this weekend; LA hosts San Jose).

Regardless, if you look at the numbers in Joshua Mayers’ post at The Seattle Times, you see that 64,000 appears to be a type of threshold. All the non-Timbers highs end up around that mark, while the current tickets sold number for the LA game is hovering at around the same level. Between the casual fans drawn to the rivalry and the army that drives north for the match, maybe there are 3,000 people who’ll go to a Seattle-Portland match who wouldn’t otherwise show up.

With so many tickets already sold for LA, Seattle has a chance to raise that bar, if not toss it aside entirely.

1 – Seattle can still win the Shield, but they’ll have to out-perform five teams to do so. The odds have suddenly become very long.

If the Shelbyville Sounders played in the NFL, they would have the 2nd highest total attendance and only 1,800 less than the Dallas Cowboys.

I think that in the next few years, you will see more and more NFL owners investing in Soccer. But in a more genuine way than the Krafts have. If NFL money and power get behind MLS, there is no doubt that it will be the biggest league in the world.